.com Disclosures, federal guidelines

The Federal Trade Commission recently updated their “Dot Com Disclosures” guidelines to include social media sites (example, Twitter and Facebook). Basically what it does is clarify that if you are sending a promoted tweet or other message, you need to disclose it to your “readers.” This expands on the previous guidelines that stated something similar for blogging and online reviews. 

Recommended reading:

• Staying legal with FTC’s new Twitter, Facebook rules, at Houston Business Journal
• FTC Reboots .com Disclosures: Four Key Points and One Possible Way to Bypass the Issue Altogether, at business.ftc.gov
• FTC Staff Revises Online Advertising Disclosure Guidelines, at ftc.gov
• The PDF version of .com Disclosures, “How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising”